Faculty Books

FSU History faculty members have published more than 75 books on a wide range of subjects and won half a dozen awards in the process. Review the full booklist below and visit the faculty bios to learn more about the authors.

By Claudia Liebeskind

Napoleonic Foot Soldiers and Civilians

Presenting a unique view of the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleonic Foot Soldiers and Civilians highlights the experiences of common soldiers and civilians to explore core civil-military interactions during this time in history, giving you a more in-depth picture of life for a soldier.

Piety on Its Knees: Three Sufi Traditions in South Asia in Modern Times

This study analyses religious changes in Sufism in South Asia in the modern period.

By Cathy McClive

The Art of Childbirth: A Seventeenth-Century Midwife's Epistolary Treatise to Doctor Vallant: A Bilingual Edition Volume 98

The extraordinary story of a seventeenth-century French midwife and her treatise on childbirth.

Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France

Early modern bodies, particularly menstruating and pregnant bodies, were not stable signifiers.

By Katherine Mooney

Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey (Black Lives)

Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in America at the end of the nineteenth century.

Race Horse Men: How Slavery and Freedom were made at the Racetrack

Race Horse Men recaptures the vivid sights, sensations, and illusions of nineteenth-century thoroughbred racing, America’s first mass spectator sport.

Ruined By This Miserable War: The Dispatches of Charles Prosper Fauconnet

In March 1863, after Northern general Benjamin F. Butler demanded the recall of the French consul-general, an unabashed Confederate sympathizer, from Union-occupied New Orleans, Charles Prosper Fauconnet assumed the duties of acting consul.

By Nilay Özok-Gündoğan

The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire

This book narrates the rise and fall of Kurdish nobility in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century. Focusing on one noble Kurdish family based in the emirate of Palu, a fortressed town in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, it provides the first systematic analysis of the hereditary nobility in Kurdistan.

By James Palmer

The Chronicle of an Anonymous Roman: Rome, Italy, and Latin Christendom, c. 1325-1360

The Chronicle of an Anonymous Roman is a treasure of history writing and of medieval Italian literature.

The Virtues of Economy: Governance, Power, and Piety in Late Medieval Rome

The humanist perception of fourteenth-century Rome as a slumbering ruin awaiting the Renaissance and the return of papal power has cast a long shadow on the historiography of the city.

By G. Kurt Piehler

A Religious History of the American GI in World War II (Studies in War, Society, and the Military)

A Religious History of the American GI in World War II breaks new ground by recounting the armed forces’ unprecedented efforts to meet the spiritual needs of the fifteen million men and women who served in World War II.

World War II

There are countless books detailing the history of World War II, but none has examined the differences among soldiers’s experiences based on their service branch’s culture.

Remembering War the American Way

Wars do not fully end when the shooting stops.

By Paul Renfro

The Life and Death of Ryan White

In the 1980s, as HIV/AIDS ravaged queer communities and communities of color in the United States and beyond, a straight white teenager named Ryan White emerged as the face of the epidemic.

Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood and the American Carceral State

Beginning with Etan Patz's disappearance in Manhattan in 1979, a spate of high-profile cases of missing and murdered children stoked anxieties about the threats of child kidnapping and exploitation.

Growing Up America: Youth and Politics since 1945

Growing Up America brings together new scholarship that considers the role of children and teenagers in shaping American political life during the decades following the Second World War.

By Maximilian Miguel Scholz

Strange Brethren: Refugees, Religious Bonds, and Reformation in Frankfurt, 1554-1608

In the sixteenth century, German cities and territories welcomed thousands of refugees fleeing the religious persecution sparked by the Reformation.

By Suzanne Sinke

Across Borders: Dutch Migration to North America and Australia

The Association for the Advancement of Dutch-American Studies (AADAS) chose “across borders” as the theme for their 2010 biennial conference in part to reflect the literal passage across borders which this meeting in Canada entailed for AADAS members from the United States.

Letters Across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants

This collection addresses the recent rebirth of interest in immigrant letters.

Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880-1920

In this deftly researched ethnographic portrait, Suzanne M. Sinke skillfully adapts the concept of social reproduction to examine the shifting gender roles of tens of thousands of Dutch Protestant women who crossed the Atlantic from 1880 to 1920 to make new homes in the United States.

A Century of European Migrations 1830-1930

From the Introduction by Rudolph J. Vecoli: "This volume is the outcome of a symposium held at the Spring Hilll Center, Wayzata, Minnesota, November 6-9, 1986 to mark the centennial of the Statue of Liberty and the twentieth anniversary of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota.

By Nathan Stoltzfus

The Power of Populism and People: Resistance and Protest in the Modern World

Recent years have seen a disturbing advance in populist and authoritarian styles of rule and, in response, a rise in popular activism.

Women Defying Hitler: Resistance and Rescue under the Nazis

This timely volume brings together an international team of leading scholars to explore the ways that women responded to situations of immense deprivation, need, and victimization under Hitler's dictatorship.

Protest in Hitler's “National Community” Popular Unrest and the Nazi Response

That Hitler’s Gestapo harshly suppressed any signs of opposition inside the Third Reich is a common misconception.

Hitler's Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany

A comprehensive and eye-opening examination of Hitler’s regime, revealing the numerous strategic compromises he made in order to manage dissent.

Nazi Crimes and the Law

This book examines the use of national and international law to prosecute Nazi crimes, the centerpiece of twentieth-century state-sponsored genocide and mass murder crimes, the paradigmatic instance of state-sponsored criminality and genocide in the twentieth century.

Courageous Resistance: The Power of Ordinary People

During times of injustice, some individuals or groups courageously resist maltreatment of all people, regardless of backgrounds.

Shades of Green: Environment Activism Around the Globe

Shades of Green examines the impact of political, economic, religious, and scientific institutions on environmental activism around the world.

Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany

When Hitler assumed power in 1933, he and other Nazis had firm ideas on what they called a racially pure “community of the people.”

Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosentrasse Protest in Nazi Germany

In February 1943, the Nazis began a final roundup of German Jews. The Gestapo swiftly arrested approximately 10,000 Jews remaining in Berlin. Most of them died within days in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. 

By Charles Upchurch

Beyond the Law: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain

In nineteenth-century England, sodomy was punishable by death; even an accusation could damage a man’s reputation for life.

Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain's Age of Reform

This book examines changing perceptions of sex between men in early Victorian Britain, a significant yet surprisingly little explored period in the history of Western sexuality.

By George S. Williamson

The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche

Since the dawn of Romanticism, artists and intellectuals in Germany have maintained an abiding interest in the gods and myths of antiquity while calling for a new mythology suitable to the modern age.

By Laurie Wood

Archipelago of Justice: Law in France's Early Modern Empire

This book is a groundbreaking evaluation of the interwoven trajectories of the people, such as itinerant ship-workers and colonial magistrates, who built France’s first empire between 1680 and 1780 in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.